The present invention relates to computer systems, and more particular to virtual machines.
Cloud computing often requires the ability to quickly scale computing resources as demands change. Virtual machines techniques, which are available from a number of companies, including International Business Machines of Armonk, N.Y. and VMWare Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., allow a portion of a relatively large computer system to be formed into a smaller computer system for a specific purpose as needed. For instance, a portion of a server system may be formed into a Web server. Moreover, the smaller computer system may be replicated as needed to provide more computing resources. For instance, a large number of Web servers could be quickly formed from a first Web server. Thus, virtual machines may be implemented quickly and are quite useful in cloud computing environments.